PERHAPS IT IS the landscape that inspires such itchy-footed greed. From Emerson to Whitman, Twain to Washington and Cather all the way up to Junot Diaz, so many of America's best writers cannot sit still for long. They are hungry to see where they are calling from, and the early Americans took unimaginable risks to do so. By stagecoach, by river, by railroad they went.

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Emerson and Whitman in particular saw how awesome and violent America could be. Both witnessed the ravages of the Civil War up close and both knew, too, that further back the land had been soaked in the blood of its theft. Still, they mostly travelled for softer reasons - for adventure and for scenery, to give speeches and seek out companionship. Every now and then, though, they hit the road and learned what they already knew about their place in the world. "I do not want the constellations any nearer," Whitman wrote in his lesser known poem, Song of the Open Road, "I know they are very well where they are,/I know they suffice for those who belong to them."

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This reversal - to belong to the landscape and cosmos, rather than possess it as owner - is the rail switch between imperialism and cosmology in American literature. No 20th-century writer has followed the latter path so vividly as Annie Dillard. "We are here on the planet only once," she wrote in her great meteorological diary, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, using the humble vernacular as only she can: "might as well get a feel for the place". Dillard spoke like a young person because she was one. She wrote that book in 1972-73 in the library of Hollins College, Virginia, the same place she had earned a master's on the work of Henry David Thoreau six years earlier, stoked by Vantage cigarettes and chocolate milk.

Rereading the book 42 years after its publication is like spying a comet that arcs through every bookstore. It is less a work of non-fiction than a long poem of revelatory intensity. Moving through the seasons, entry by entry, the book puts a bead on Thoreau's Walden, and proves what a keener, more sceptical eye can wrest from the application of mind to landscape. In the behaviour of bugs and birds, the shifting ripple of water, Dillard finds both cruelty and kindness. In the landscape itself, she discovers an uncomplicated explosion of creation - every day. "I come down to the water to cool my my eyes," Dillard writes, walking to the creek behind her home. "But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder and the whole world sparks and flames."

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. Dillard was just 29 years old and already rocketing to an early and peculiarly American kind of guru fame. Rather than double down on her role as naturalist-in-chief, Dillard lit out for the open country and disappeared. She left a marriage, moved west to Washington State, and began a career writing and teaching that lasted another 40-odd years, including works of translation, minor theology, ground-breaking essay writing, paradigm-shifting literary criticism, poetry, memoir, fiction, and travel writing that is without parallel today.

Even though Dillard stopped writing some years back, her body of work is so enlarging in its thoughtful register that it needs to be reduced down to manageable size in order to approach it without terror or trepidation, which is possible now The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New is available.

This book replaces The Annie Dillard Reader, which is 20 years old and does not contain several later works, most notably the magnificent riff on civilisations and their bent for destruction, For the Time Being, or the novel The Maytrees, both of which reflect Dillard's mind grappling at its peak with the notion of erasure and eternity.

To read Dillard - who lives today between the woods of Virginia, Key West, Florida and the Massachusetts shore - without these works is like reading Philip Roth without considering his short, late novels. Like Roth, Dillard is possessed, or obsessed, with what is often crudely labelled as life force - what gives living things their peculiar pulse and power. From a very early age, though, she realised that this line of breath runs out.

One sees this awareness in full display in the book's opening essay, Total Eclipse, that depicts a trip Dillard and her husband took to a town near Yakima, Washington to watch the sun disappear. There is a reason why this essay is taught in nearly every American writing program on creative non-fiction. There's no secret here. She simply writes with power, her verbs leveraging the prose up toward lyric tension. Her diction crackles with precision. Then comes the wall of darkness advancing at 3000 km/h as the eclipse arrives. The best part of the piece is the aftermath as the author sits clobbered by spectacle, reeling - like an athlete - at the task of simply being there. "The mind - culture - has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel."

And yet with these tools she managed, across four decades, to describe again and again - in language startlingly alive - how to stay awake to the world and its possibilities. She spent time with weasels, watched the killing of deer, trekked across distant landscapes. She described baseball as well as any lifelong sport reporter. In one case, she turned a simple moth's dive-bomb into a flame into one of the most soaring two-page riffs on what it feels like to be alive, to be so clobbered by the senses it seems impossible you will ever die. And then she could return to a humbler, searching register, aphorisms cupped loosely in her hand like self-fashioned compasses, zinging off distant poles. "Like the bear who went over the mountain," she writes, "I went out to see what I could see." This is pure Dillard, the bear-hug to what can see hokum, but a song of the self's true purpose. To be here and to see.

It's hard to imagine a more unlikely origin for such an unfettered American prophet. Born into a wealthy, white-gloved Pittsburgh family, as she describes in her memoir, An American Childhood, she came from a city enshrined in monuments to the wealth one could wrench from the earth.

Dillard mentions in the passage included here from An American Childhood that her father was a restless soul. He read and reread Jack Kerouac's On the Road. He taught his children to dance. He let them know, early enough to contemplate what it meant, that life wasn't fair to everyone. Somehow, out of this long-ago place and this example of impatience, Annie Dillard emerged and in this small book lay the footprints of her search for answers to questions big and small. Why aren't we drowning in sand? How can time be eternal, what does morning look like, each day, in the creek behind her house? Why does suffering exist? She was not the most intrepid traveller the US has given birth to, nor was she its hardest-nosed reporter. But no one looked at the big questions harder.

"Writing every book, the writer must solve two problems," she says in an indispensable book, The Writing Life. "Can it be done? and, Can I do it?" By my count, she answered that question emphatically 11 times, "Yes". What a joy and a gift to have this twelfth reminder that she did.

John Freeman is the editor of Freeman's, a literary biannual, and author of How to Read a Novelist.